After a journey of almost three years, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the Red Planet’s Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before.
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A portion of the west rim of Endeavour crater sweeps southward in this color view from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. This crater — with a diameter of about 14 miles (22 kilometers) — is …
The six men in the Mars500 facility near Moscow have been in isolation now 365 days. The European crewmembers have been writing in their latest letters home about the highlights, monotonous life, team spirit and determination to go on.
“Wow, it’s already been a year,†begins Diego Urbina, one of the two Mars500 crewmembers from ESA, in his latest diary … Read the rest of this article
Images from the recent flyby of Phobos, on 7 March 2010, are released today. The images show Mars’ rocky moon in exquisite detail, with a resolution of just 4.4 metres per pixel. They show the proposed landing sites for the forthcoming Phobos-Grunt mission.
ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft orbits the Red Planet in a highly elliptical, polar orbit that brings it … Read the rest of this article
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Mars rover Spirit has tenaciously swept, scraped, and squeezed secrets from the forbidding surface of Mars for 6 years. Now at an impasse, up to its belly in sand, it has struggled to tilt its … Read the rest of this article
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Spirit surveys its own predicament. The bright soil pictured left is loose, fluffy material churned by the rover’s left-front wheel as Spirit, driving backwards, broke through a darker, crusty surface. At right is the least-embedded of the rover’s six wheels. |
Homer’s Iliad tells the story of Troy, a city besieged by the Greeks in the Trojan War. Today, a lone … Read the rest of this article
July 2008 – Rise of the Phoenix: Patrick Moore has an update on the NASA spacecraft Phoenix’s mission to Mars. After a month on the planet’s surface it has sent back unique images of the frozen ice caps. Chris Lintott travels to Tucson, Arizona, from where the NASA Phoenix team are operating the lander. He finds out how the spacecraft … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers have announced the discovery of a fifth planet circling 55 Cancri, a star beyond our solar system. The star now holds the record for number of confirmed extrasolar planets orbiting around it in a planetary system.
55 Cancri is located 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer and has nearly the same mass and age as our sun. … Read the rest of this article
By the time you finish reading this sentence, you’ll be 25 miles closer to the planet Mars.
Earth and Mars are converging, and right now the distance between the two planets is shrinking at a rate of 22,000 mph–or about 25 miles per sentence. Ultimately, this will lead to a close approach in late December 2007 when Mars will outshine … Read the rest of this article
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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Aurora Oval
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How to Watch the NASA Curiosity Mars Mission Launch Today
After eight years of planning, more than $600 million in cost overruns, and a two-year delay, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory is finally ready to launch.
Now you can watch the nuclear-powered, 1-ton rover — currently the largest machine that can feasibly land on the Red Planet — take off from Cape Canaveral and begin its journey to Mars.…
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